Month: April 2008
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Global warming: we have 10 years to avoid catastrophe
The arxiv isn’t usually the place where climate scientists make predictions about global warming but yesterday, they made an exception. A group led by James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists who works at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, warned that global warming is having much worse effects on Earth’s climate than…
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A survey of quantum programming languages
It cannot be long before somebody breathes life into a useful quantum computer. And when that happens, an entirely new breed of keyboard monkey will be born: the quantum computer programmer. This strange animal will have to work with the weird and wonderful tools of the quantum world, such as superposition of quantum bits, entanglement,…
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Criticality and the brain
Our understanding of how various parts of brain function is advancing at breakneck speed and yet we are as far away as ever from an overarching “theory of the brain” that attempts to encompass these discoveries. Such a theory would unite disparate discoveries in brain science under a unifying theme. Now Dante Chialvo from Northwestern…
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The hunt for superheavy elements
The heaviest elements are a shy, retiring bunch. No sooner are they created than they disappear in a puff of smoke. The heaviest, ununoctium, has an atomic number of 118 and an atomic weight of 294. The Russians made a single atom of the stuff back in 2002 only to discover that it hung around…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…the sparks from the arxivblog this week: A new class of photon gun Buckyballs boost flash memory The coming blackout Statistical evidence of drug abuse in baseball Relativity sung to the tune of Yellow Submarine Qutrit breakthrough brings quantum computers closer
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Qutits ‘n’ qutats
The best of the rest from the physics arxiv this week: Improving Resolution by Means of Ghost Imaging Realistic Haptic Rendering of Interacting Deformable Objects in Virtual Environments Radio Detection of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays The Yale Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber The Galactic Gamma-Ray Club
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Qutrit breakthrough brings quantum computers closer
The folks playing with quantum computers have been claiming for years that their gadgets will one day make today’s supercomputers look like quivering lumps of jelly. But so far, their computers have yet to match the calculating prowess of a 10-year old with ADHD. The most exciting work so far has been on universal quantum…
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Relativity sung to the tune of Yellow Submarine
Max Tegmark and Flora Lopis have been working hard on teaching the 8.033 course on relativity at MIT. They publish it today on the arXiv saying: “To maximize the learning experience from this technical review, the reader is encouraged to sing it to the tune of Yellow Submarine, with italicized lines going like the chorus…”…
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Statistical evidence of drug abuse in baseball
How many major league baseball players have used performance-enhancing drugs? The answer turns out to be buried in the performance statistics of players, if you know where to look. Eugene Stanley and colleagues at Boston University have done the appropriate number crunching and say that a whopping 5 per cent of players must have been…
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The coming blackout
On Monday, 17th December 2007, Europe narrowly avoided disaster. A cold snap had lowered the temperature across much of continent to several degrees below average and that evening, as households across the continent switched on their heating systems, the power consumption hit critical levels. France, Italy and Spain all set new records for power consumption.…